Sax it up

One saxophone can sound brash enough. What happens when you get 130 playing together? Tom Service finds out

A serious blow: some of the over 130 professional and amateur saxophonists about to take part in their moment of theatrical magic in Salvatore Sciarrino's The Mouth, the Feet, the Sound. Photo: Raphael Pierre

A piece for 130 saxophones ought to be one of the brashest works ever written: it's an ensemble that seems like a grotesquely inflated jazz combo, a big band on steroids. But not if you are Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino. His work, La bocca, i piedi, il suono (The Mouth, the Feet, the Sound) for professional saxophone quartet and 130 amateur saxophonists, is one of the quietest three-quarters of an hour in contemporary music. When the Xasax Saxophone Quartet and a significant section of Scotland's saxophone-playing community perform the piece in the Royal Museum in Edinburgh on Monday, the audience can expect not to have their ears blasted but rather caressed.

So why use so many saxophones if you're only going to make them play pianissimo? Markus Weiss of Xasax is not surprised: "All his music for the last 15 years or so has been focused on quiet sounds," he says, "and the sounds he asks the instruments to make are his alone: nobody else asks for these very soft noises. They are the Sciarrinisms of the saxophone."

Sciarrino, 57, is Italy's most prominent contemporary composer, a man obsessed with the limits of sound, with creating pieces in a mysterious region where music, silence, and noise meet. He's written works that transform instrumental ensembles into gigantic aviaries by making flutes and violins sound like nightingales and swans, and piano pieces that are so quiet they would be drowned out by the merest foot-shuffle in the audience. It sounds like a world of avant-garde extremism, but there's a sensuality to Sciarrino's music that makes it uniquely seductive.

A quiet cacophony of these sounds greets me at a rehearsal in Edinburgh with a dozen players from the 130-strong ensemble. What sounds like a torrent of falling rain is actually the saxophonists clacking the keys of their instruments; what could be the distant cries of a flock of geese is a low, chromatic sigh; a whistle-like wind is produced by the saxophones' harmonics. Joe Pacewicz, saxophonist and clarinettist with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and charged by the Edinburgh festival to find and rehearse the 130 players, pleads with his saxophonists: "No notes! It's so important not to have any recognisable notes in these sounds." Which sounds like the most paradoxical instruction to give any group of musicians - except in Sciarrino's music. "I haven't played a piece like it in my career," Pacewicz says, "but although the sounds he's chosen appear to be technically demanding, they are easily approached by people of all levels. And they work really well - particularly the raindrop sound. When we had 30 saxophones together, you almost felt you had to put your umbrella up." And that's just a fraction of the tempest that will engulf the Royal Museum.

But these surreal sounds are not usually associated with the saxophone. "People assume it's a jazz instrument," continues Pacewizc, "which is not necessarily what Adolphe Sax had in mind in Belgium in the 1840s when he invented the saxophone." However, for Weiss, the way Sciarrino challenges audience expectations of the instrument is only part of the significance. "The really interesting thing about the piece is the mass phenomenon," he says, "and that you can't have the right effect with only 10 players, you have to have all 130 people playing it."

The work is structured in three parts, with the first for the quartet alone, stationed at the four corners of the space - in Edinburgh, around the fish pond in the middle of the atrium of the Royal Museum - before the offstage saxophones join in. It's a moment that can have strange acoustic effects. As Weiss says: "The funny thing is that at a couple of performances the off-stage instruments sounded like people talking outside. It's a weird thing about saxophones: they can sound like birds in the distance or like people chattering." The final part is a procession for the whole ensemble, in which the 130 players walk through, wearing all-black outfits but treading with bare feet, ending with a signal from the quartet.

It seems a suggestive, ritualistic form of theatre, but for Weiss, the piece is practical rather than metaphorical. "The title is quite pragmatic," he says, "so the mouth is used to play the saxophone, to produce the sounds on the instrument, and the players also make noises with their feet." But there is a political dimension to the procession at the end of the performance. As Weiss explains: "Sciarrino told us at one rehearsal that he wrote the piece in 1997, just after the war in Yugoslavia, and was thinking about all the ships coming to Italy with immigrants from Albania. The image of all these people walking into a strange place gave him the idea for the closing section."

There is another drama to The Mouth, the Feet, the Sound. At the end, the quartet suddenly plays a loud, repeated note. "It is very mechanical music," Weiss says, "which has the effect of stiffening and stopping the piece. It's as if this clockwork wins at the end, the machine wins over nature." After the heightened naturalism of so many of the sounds in the piece, and the undulating, indefinable textures produced by the procession of saxophonists, this violent loudness will be a shocking moment in the Royal Museum. For the most part, however, Weiss thinks of the piece in far more gentle terms: "The work can be very dense, soft, and refined. The ensemble is like a whale: it's not a very brutal animal, but it is very big, and if we get the performance right, it should just float." Turning saxophones into whales: just another of the magical, anthropomorphic transformations of Sciarrino's music.

· The Xasax Quartet and 130 saxophones perform The Mouth, the Feet, the Sound at the Royal Museum, Edinburgh, on Monday at 10.30pm. Box office: 0131-473 2000